This is a really good question. Saunders doesn’t purport to have an “explanashun,” but as anyone familiar with his body of work knows — from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, his breathtaking first story collection way back in 1998, to this year’s chart-topping Tenth of December, plus all the stories, novellas and essays in between — Saunders has a powerful knack for exploring the contradictions that drive our era, with an ear for the American idiom that is downright musical.

Happily, for those inclined to take their literature in the oral-tradition-meets-digital-publishing medium of audiobooks, Saunders narrates the audio version himself, adding warmth and wit to the listening experience.

eMusic contributor Amanda Davidson talked with Saunders over email about playing music, writing fiction, and reading stories out loud.

You’ve been on an epic book tour for Tenth of December. Are there any songs or albums that you’re currently listening to in order to refresh your spirits?

I pretty much blew my ears out in the 1980s when I worked on an oil crew and the Walkman had just been invented, so I try to minimize my headphone time these days. But we live an hour and a half from the nearest airport, so I get some good music-in-the-car time in on those drives. I’ve been listening to a mix that someone gave me, and it has on there “Peggy Sang the Blues” by Frank Turner, and “Stop Cryin’ About the Rain,” by Graham Parker. I’ve also been listening to After the Gold Rush by Neil Young, and (repetitively) “One Sunday Morning” by Wilco. Also “God I’m Missing You” — a Rodney Crowell-Mary Karr song done by Lucinda Williams on the Crowell-Karr album Kin. A really beautiful song, and an astonishing performance of it. Other than that — total silence.

There’s a connection between language and music in your new story, as Fox 8 trots past a house and hears “the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds. They sounded grate! They sounded like prety music!” Can you describe the genesis of Fox 8′s voice?

As far as I can remember, I’d written a humor piece where the narrator was a dog, and had some fun with that — he was kind of smart and also kind of dumb. And then I wrote another humor piece called “Coarse Evaluation” which was this course evaluation written by a high-school kid who was basically illiterate. It started like this:

At first this class was a pretty easy class to take. The readings were interesting but often tedious. The kids in class always seemed paranoid about being struck down by others. Unfortunately this factor led to an awkward vibe which both contributed and caused the demise of the teacher

And had soon descended to this, re. the class’s reading of “A Christmas Carol”:

When them ghosts came we did not find it scarry. Would have been scarier if one ghosts tongue had shot out and likked Mr Scrooge or Marley or whoever, that one guy who was such a tightass in terms of his money?

So I kind of combined the two: a fox who is only moderately literate.

I like to have some sort of self-imposed constraint when I’m writing. Somehow this has the paradoxical effect of freeing me up. So to be “constrained” to the bad spelling helped me — it seemed like it produced a possibility for a sort of extra level of poetry, if you see what I mean. If you say: “When the sun went down, the world went dark” — well, that’s one phrase. If you say, “When sun goes down, werld goes dark” — it’s got a different feeling. So I had a good time exploring what felt like a slightly new form of English — trying to find the hot spots and funny places and so on.

Fox 8 is full of sentences that are both funny and heated, critical and tender-hearted. Is there a way that your approach to language allows you layer these tones and feelings?

I think there is, yes, absolutely. That is the whole principle underlying the notion of style: that how we say something and what we say are not at all separate, and that there are untold levels of magic possible in the simple arrangement of words — that the human reading apparatus is deeply nuanced and perceptive, beyond our ability to explain or reduce.

But the pisser is, there are not any rules or guidance as to how or where or when to do this — I think you have to just wade in, phrase by phrase, and see what you’ve done and adjust accordingly. That is the fun part and the terrifying part, to me: it is all done (and can only be done) on the line-to-line level, by taste. And then you come back again and again, micro-adjusting each time — which will often introduce new possibilities, and so on and so on…

Was there any particular music, or musical style, that informed Fox 8?

It’s a funny thing. I love music, I play music, but I tend to keep music and writing very separate. Never (never) listen to music when I’m writing, and have learned to run away if a certain song is “inspiring” me too much. When it comes to writing, I am a purist. I think the prose has to do what it does all on its own — has to come forth out of complete silence and move the reader completely on its own, and so on.

All this by way of saying that when you asked that question, I drew a total blank. I mean, I could make something up, but honestly — nothing musical presents itself, related to that story. Or any of my stories.

Writing in silence makes a lot of sense, considering the relationship between silence and music, or silence and language. If you ever listen for dialogue, do you listen for the unsaid?

I think most dialogue is the unsaid. There’s a great comic energy in that move where two people talk around something, or talk past each other.

I’m interested in the way that Americans — well, probably people in general — tend to address their anxiety with yap. I know I do. This tendency to lack the self-confidence to simply not do anything — to refrain, to be silent, not react, not shoot, just stay out of the shit — that seems to be an American thing. It’s like we can’t tolerate being sidelined or inactive or inessential to any moment. We always have to be active and at the center of things. That’s a big generality, but I do sometimes wonder why it is that, if, say, a European gets pissed off, he gets drunk and falls asleep on the curb — takes himself out of the action. He can tolerate being abased, somewhat. But an American guy (again, generalizing like a big dog), especially your generic white guy, doesn’t like that. It’s as if he can’t say: “I am small/minor/temporarily losing.” If humiliated, he has to go out and do something. It’s like the worst thing that could happen is that, for a while, he might be…passive, or absent, or quiet, or inessential.

Except for me, of course. I am one of those virtuous, self-possessed white guys.

I read recently that you play guitar. How long have you been playing?

I started in seventh grade. One of our nuns was offering free lessons, so I went for it. They were basically teaching us to play for Mass, so we first learned “Kumbaya,” and then “We Are One in the Spirit,” with the iconic strumming pattern called, uh, “Down, Down, Up/Up, Down, Up.” And then I played in bands all through college and after.

Do you practice a lot? Does the repetition of that process connect with your writing?

I do practice a lot. When I was in college, for a certain period, I was playing an hour or so of scales a day. Now it’s more that technical approach called “just farting around.”

I think music has informed my writing in lots of (very complicated) ways. There’s an “ear” component in both — a way of training yourself in close listening. There’s also this idea that the real place of communication is sub-rational — just learning to trust that the real magic in a piece of art occurs in sub-conceptual places.

And then, as you suggest, there is no limit to the number of times one may have to play a piece of music before it’s satisfactory. Ditto with writing. Being involved with music taught me early on that, in art, you get no points for mere effort — the thing has to work at the end, or it’s back to the drawing board.

Are you currently working on any guitar pieces?

Lately I’ve been trying to write songs — I have this goal of writing, in my lifetime, one song that doesn’t revolt me. So far, no luck. But it is fun to work on them, and especially fun to work on the guitar parts. I have Logic Express on a dedicated computer in the basement, so I’ve been overdubbing and very slowly learning about recording — just as a hobby, or as a reminder of what “beginner mind” really feels like. (“Beginner mind” is a nice way of saying “How it feels to keep sucking even when you really want to be good.”)

Do the songs that you write and record have lyrics?

They do have lyrics. That is actually the part I’m most unhappy with. The lyrics I write tend to be kind of linear and logical and narrative — and not in a good way. I haven’t found any truths that I could only express via a lyric, I guess is how I’d put it. So that’s interesting to me — I know what a great song sounds like, I understand the qualities of allusiveness and so on, but just can’t seem to summon that up in this context. That’s what I mean by “beginner mind.” And that’s why I like to experience it. It’s good to be reminded that a lot of what I take for granted in prose writing might not be so obvious to, or easy for, a young student writer.  And it’s also interesting (and frustrating) to see that diagnosing or recognizing a problem does not necessarily lead to solution of same.

You recorded your own audiobooks for both Fox 8 and Tenth of December. Did you enjoy the process?

I loved it. I said I’d be willing to, and Random House was nice enough to let me do it. I had a great producer, Kelly Gildea, and we just had a lot of fun with it. I do a good number of college readings, and I’ve come to understand reading aloud as a performance that is quite separate from writing but offers another opportunity to engage with what you’ve written, and also to sort of teach yourself what the next thing is going to be. I think I might also be a bit of a frustrated actor.

It’s an interesting question, this one of writing versus reading aloud. I remember when I was on tour with my first book — those were hard stories to read. They read better on the page than they did out loud — they had lots of strange phrasings and so on. And something about having to read them repetitively and never really finding the right way to do it forced out the first story in the second book. That story was called “The Falls,” and it was much more playful and colloquial and readable than the stories in the first book. I think that, at some level, I was giving myself something to read on the road. It was as if whatever it is in us that forms voice, pre-writing, had taken note, and was trying to come up with something a little more verbally interesting.

Do you make discoveries about the stories you’ve already written by reading them out loud, whether in the studio or at readings?

Yes, absolutely. You find out where the laughs are, you find out how to pitch a given character via the voice you give her (too much in this direction and she becomes a caricature; go too far back the other way and you start losing humor). Sometimes you can feel when a moment is powerful by the quality of the silence. There is also, I think, a really beneficial effect in that you are getting very close to that ancient storyteller mode: there you are, there’s your crowd, you’ve got 30 minutes; how much of a deep connection can you make? I’ve done a lot of readings since this new book came out in January and I can feel that I am really learning something about connection with an audience — for example, that you can trust them to get the subtle and deep things; that they really are interested in the things I’m interested in; that you don’t have to have a joke a minute to interest them. I can feel that all of this is going to come into play with the next book.

The live audience connection you mention is a rare treat, since there are so few forums in which adults get to listen to stories, together. Children, though, have this experience more often — Fox 8 even learns English by eavesdropping on bedtime stories.

Yes — Fox 8 started out as a kids’ book. But then, it turns out, kids’ books can’t have so many misspellings. I’d sent it out to a few editors and they all said the same thing. That was an interesting moment: What I’d thought of as a kids’ book was…not. For sure. So then I felt a door opening: Well, if it’s not a kids’ book, what is it that separates a kids’ book from one for adults? And I’ve always thought that a kids’ book should serve the function of assuring this scared, new little person that sometimes things turn out well; that goodness has a place in the world. And maybe a story for adults — especially in a fortunate, possibly smug culture like ours — might serve a different function: telling a powerful, self-assured person that sometimes things don’t turn out well, that they aren’t turning out well for some people even as we speak. So when I realized it was not a kids’ book, it gave me permission to change the function of the story, essentially; it allowed (or maybe required) some darkness to come in. And I liked the way that dark event resonated with the peppy kids’ book language — it was kind of like I’d made this complete sweetheart and then lowered the boom on him. A little harsh, but then I thought: Does that ever happen in the real world? Does a real sweetheart ever get the boom lowered on him? And I answered myself: Duh.

Fox 8 is a sweetheart, but he’s not simply a foil for human cruelty — he justifies his own aggression toward chickens, for example. Still, one layer of meaning I took away is that it would benefit all creatures if we humans were more aware and thoughtful about habitat destruction.

For me, the way fiction works is that it always occurs to a specific person (or fox), at a specific time under specific circumstances. So, to the fox, habitat destruction is a big issue, especially at this time. But he’s pretty willing to destroy a chicken habitat, or even a chicken, and then rationalize that. I think fiction works best when it is basically saying, “Ah, see? Sometimes it is thus.” So we can understand why malls get built and how that can be a good thing, and, at the same time, we can see that, whenever a mall gets built, stuff gets destroyed, which is a bad thing — and we can leave the scenario not saying, “Fuck it! Build malls anyway! Capitalism must be served!” and also not saying, “Evil mall-builders! Cease and desist! Never build a mall, if you love animals,” but rather, “Ah, see? Sometimes it is thus.”

Although, on the other hand, who can argue with “more aware and thoughtful”?

My feeling about the moral intention in fiction is: show characters in action, try to be fair to them, and tell the story in the most lively and truthful language you can; admit to ambiguity, and, as you write, try to move closer and closer to the natural energy of the story, and  away from your conceptions/hopes about it — and good things will happen. To the reader and the writer.

A seminal coming-of-age novel of the 20th century.

Go Tell It on the Mountain is James Baldwin’s seminal, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel. John Grimes, Baldwin’s 14-year-old protagonist-slash-proxy, lives in a world structured by punishing dichotomies: salvation vs. sin, white violence vs. black survival. John, though tentatively at first, pushes at these seemingly fixed contrasts, mainly by way of his gift for reading and writing. His bookishness is a burden and a weapon, a passport and a mark of difference. He wants to swagger and play sports, but instead he “sins with his hand” while thinking about other boys, or pines after Elisha, a young teacher at church. At home, John is expected to become a preacher like his father, and yet his father shows him only rage and cruelty.

In the middle section, Baldwin unravels the backstories of John’s father, mother and aunt, but as the reader becomes privy to these characters’ buried histories, their anger and sorrow remain indecipherable to John. Still, John comes into his own as, finally, he is called to “the threshing floor.” Baldwin’s prose becomes porous and prophetic as John has visions of ancestors lost to slavery rising in resistance, and finds the strength, at last, to face himself and enter his own moment.

Originally published in 1954, Go Tell It on the Mountain remains fresh and essential, and the audiobook does justice to the subtlety and power of Baldwin’s prose.

What's not to love about a posthumous collection of Wallace's essays — and why we love it anyway

Both Flesh and Not rounds up a mélange of David Foster Wallace’s essays — sports reportage, surveys of contemporary authors, movie and book reviews, grammar pointers, and cultural criticism — never published in book form during his lifetime. Wallace committed suicide in 2008, and who can say what he would have chosen to include in this collection had he been alive to edit it. But what we have been given is by turns hypersmart and hypertender, infuriating and inspiring, allowing Wallace’s energizing, rigorous, and formally wide-open perspective to remain in the conversation about the future of American literature.

The book opens with the gorgeous title essay, about tennis phenomenon Roger Federer. “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” originally published in 2006 in The New York Times’ sports magazine and by now almost canonical, showcases Wallace’s most agile and compelling moves as a prose stylist, philosopher and innovator of the essay form (those infectious footnotes!), along with his novelist’s eye (and ear) for human vulnerability and pleasingly down-to-earth colloquialisms.

In the penultimate essay, “Deciderization 2007 — a Special Report,” Wallace presents a visionary piece of literary criticism under the guise of an introduction for The Best American Essays 2007. Ever the meta-critic, Wallace uses this intro as an opportunity to reflect on the editing process, take the temperature of his cultural moment, and pose difficult questions. Here and in other essays (“Overlooked: Five Direly Underappreciated U.S. Novels >1960,” for example), Wallace argues passionately for new writing that displays intellectual breadth, emotional vitality, and formal risk. He is especially preoccupied with “the connections between literary aesthetics and moral values.” In other words, he asks how and why we consider certain types of writing good or beautiful or literary, and what this says about our shared ethics.

These questions become useful when navigating some of the collection’s problematic moments. After the title essay, the collection moves through the remaining pieces in chronological order, starting in 1988, and the backward jump proffers some jarring claims. There is, for example, the deeply vexing “Back in New Fire,” from 1996, in which Wallace argues that since the AIDS epidemic arose from nature, it is therefore neither good nor bad. Instead, he argues, “the specter of heterosexual AIDS” might be seen as a cautious opportunity to reinvest sex with its proper gravitas by erecting new and exciting “erotic impediments” (aka safe sex practices). His framework leaves out the political dimensions of the travesty, the inadequate federal and public response to the marginalized communities most affected by the crisis — it’s akin to calling Hurricane Katrina a natural disaster that ought to be cautiously celebrated for its potential to reawaken people in, say, Rhode Island to the awesome power of weather.

Other prickly ethical/aesthetic moments occur more quietly. In “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” from 1988, tucked away in his roll call of promising new talent Wallace mentions only three female authors, and their brief, collective cameo occurs under the banner of “bitchy humor.” It’s a fairly reductive and belittling lens, though in context (it seems) the phrase is meant to be a compliment. Overall, the piece parses well the problems of a TV-saturated culture, yet here and throughout, moments like this grate.

Perhaps these criticisms are, after all, of a piece with Wallace’s own provocation to think. As he writes: “But of course you’ll see how hard the reader is required to think about all this.” And this is where the collection’s central pleasures reside. In “Twenty-Four Word Notes” (a total pleasure read for grammar and usage geeks), Wallace tries on multiple positions in the great post-modern language debates, limning words as “both symbols for real things and real things themselves.” Another way to pose this dilemma is as follows: Does language reflect the world, or does language (at least in part) make it? Wallace plays the spectrum, proposing an ambitious, expansive role for prose in general, and fiction in particular, as innovative, evolving art forms. This constant evolution is bound to be dotted with missteps alongside the revelations, and as Wallace’s work is full of revelation, so, too, is it our job as readers to engage with his mistakes. “We are heirs to a gorgeous chaos,” he writes, listing a rowdy proliferation of literary forms and conveying his broad vision of fiction’s potential energy. In the end, it’s this expansiveness of vision that makes the tour through Wallace’s own gorgeous chaos well worth it.

A looping, far-reaching novel of voice and identity

The title of Zadie Smith’s fourth novel refers to the neighborhood of North West London, where, for Smith’s characters, the main currency is voice. NW is structured around three voices in particular: Leah Hanwell, her best friend Natalie (née Keisha) Blake and Felix, a young man whose brief section forms the pivot point around which the two women’s stories circle and collide. The daughters of Irish and Jamaican immigrants, respectively, Leah and Natalie leave the neighborhood for college and brief plunges into the world beyond. Leah returns as a social worker and Natalie as an upwardly mobile lawyer, allowing Smith to chronicle a brilliant and nuanced range of spoken language. This also makes listening to the audiobook a particular pleasure, as the readers skillfully voice the dialogue-driven text. As Natalie reflects, listening to her mother gossip ruthlessly, “People were not people, but merely the effect of language. You could conjure them and kill them in a sentence.”

NW‘s central contradictions rest in this succinct proposal, referring not only to the novelists task but to Leah and Natalie themselves, who face their own conjuring acts of self-reinvention and parenthood. Using fragmented chapters and a looping chronology to dilate what might have been a fleeting, faceless headline of neighborhood violence, Smith makes it clear that what’s at stake is the capacity for empathy – her characters’ and our own.